Leading global food ingredients manufacturer Tate & Lyle have launched Dolcia Prima, a low-calorie sugar for use in processed foods and beverages globally.
Dolcia Prima is Tate & Lyle’s brand name for allulose, a low-calorie sugar that exists in nature and can be found in small quantities in some fruits and foods people eat every day. It was first identified in wheat in the 1930s.
Tate & Lyle is a global provider of ingredients and solutions to the food, beverage and other industries, with operations in over 30 locations worldwide. The Company operates through two global divisions: Speciality Food Ingredients and Bulk Ingredients.
Speciality Food Ingredients consists of three platforms: Texturants, which includes speciality starches and stabilisers; Sweeteners, which comprises nutritive sweeteners and our range of no-calorie sweeteners including SPLENDA Sucralose; and its Health and Wellness portfolio which includes speciality fibres and our salt-reduction offering.
Similar properties to sugar, ‘but fewer calories’
Tate & Lyle said its Dolcia Prima product “delivers the satisfying mouthfeel and sweetness of table sugar, but contains 90 per cent fewer calories”. The Company said this would mean food and beverage manufacturers should be able to “significantly reduce the calories in products while maintaining the same taste and enjoyment of sugar that consumers demand”.
“One of the biggest challenges our industry faces is reducing calories while maintaining the taste experience consumers expect from their favourite foods and beverages,” said Abigail Storms, Vice President, Platform Management, Sweeteners, at Tate & Lyle.
“Now food and beverage manufacturers can contribute to this public health challenge by using Dolcia Prima Low-Calorie Sugar,” Ms Storms said. “Working with Dolcia Prima, our culinary teams have learned that it is possible to provide consumers with products with all the taste, all the mouthfeel and all the texture they expect, but without all the calories,” she said.
Ms Storms said that in taste trials run by Tate & Lyle, “consumers ranked low-calorie versions of foods made with Dolcia Prima equally with the full-calorie versions”.
Formulating for the future
Tate & Lyle said Dolcia Prima Low-Calorie Sugar can be used in a range of applications including beverages, yoghurt, ice cream and baked products to reduce calories or to make lower-calorie options taste even better.
Unlike high-potency sweeteners, Dolcia Prima is 70 per cent as sweet as sucrose (sugar) and has the same temporal taste profile, which Tate & Lyle said means it “provides a clean, sweet taste as well as the functionality of sugar”.
Tate & Lyle said Dolcia Prima can be formulated successfully into many different food products that usually contain sugar because it delivers many of the benefits that sugar offers, such as adequate browning when baking, bulk and texture. It can also depress the freezing point when making frozen products. It is a highly-soluble, liquid ingredient, which means it is easy to use in liquid products and adds bulk and texture in formulations. Tate & Lyle said its applications experts have developed “optimised methods” to incorporate Dolcia Prima into a variety of products and continue to add new developments.
Allulose 101: A sugar naturally low in calories
Allulose is a low-calorie sugar, one of many sugars that exist in nature.
Allulose is a low-calorie sugar first identified in wheat over 70 years ago. It is also found in small quantities in jackfruit, figs and raisins, and in foods such as caramel sauce, maple syrup and brown sugar.
Tate & Lyle has developed a patent-protected process to produce allulose from basic agricultural raw materials (currently corn in the US).
Dolcia Prima can also be used in combination with sweeteners, such as SPLENDA Sucralose and TASTEVA Stevia Sweetener, to enable even better sweetening systems.
